This paper describes the experience of integrating a class blog into an advanced Italian course, in order to provide an out-of-class forum for language practice and for sharing course-related ideas and information. It also reports on an evaluation of the blog"s effectiveness, drawing on an analysis of the students" blog contributions and their responses to questionnaires. We argue that blogs can play a significant role in promoting learners" interaction and nurturing a sense of class community. For this to happen, however, requires careful attention to two key aspects: the way in which the use of the blog is integrated into the course content and structure; and the teachers" role in moderating and facilitating blog interaction.

While there is widespread agreement on the expected benefits of hands-on access to corpora for language learners, reports abound of the difficulties involved in realising those benefits in practice. A particular focus of discussion is the challenge of transferring the skills of the corpus linguist to learners, so that they can explore this type of monolingual and unmediated resource effectively in a 'learner-as-researcher' or 'learner-as-detective' role. In this paper we present a positive experience of an apprenticeship in corpus use, which we attribute to a training approach that seeks to exploit the unmediated nature of corpora rather than treating it as a problem for learners. Our approach is not aimed at equipping learners with skills that will allow them to derive rules or explanations from the systematic analysis of corpus data. Instead we aim to inculcate in our students a propensity for open-ended searches, and an observe-and-borrow-chunks mentality, oriented to copying models from a corpus to enrich and enhance their written production in particular. We see the training process not only as supporting their development as effective corpus users but also, in encouraging their curiosity about the language patterns to be found and their authentication of the use they make of those patterns, as likely to be beneficial to their ongoing development as strategic independent language learners more generally.

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Wikis are increasingly seen as useful tools for promoting active student engagement and collaborative language learning. Unlike most applications of wikis to foreign/ second language learning thus far reported on, ours concerns complete beginners. In this paper, we focus on our approach to and evaluation of the integration of wikis into our first-year Italian course with the aim of encouraging out-of-class practice and fostering students' sense of class community, right from the start of their learning. The evaluation showed that, although the students created several attractive and interesting pages, they did not appreciate the wikis as much as we had hoped: there were technical hitches, many found collaboration dynamics challenging, and most developed little interest in participating in a cross-campus online group. Our data analysis found no relationship between the students' perceptions of the wiki work and their gender, initial confidence or frequency of use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools. However, those who, on entering the course, placed greater importance on interaction with other students, and a sense of community in class, showed greater appreciation of the wiki experience. From these findings, we draw implications for improving our approach to integrating wiki work into our program.

This article concerns a special learning space populated by Italians and Italian learners: the choir formed in Brisbane as a joint initiative between a community association and the Italian teaching staff at Griffith University. Our aim, in involving our students in the choir, was to bring them together with L1 speakers in an environment that would be stimulating but supportive, given the collective, creative goal. We envisaged that interaction in this space would help develop the students’ language proficiency, intercultural competence, and cultural knowledge, while also bringing the psychosocial benefits of choral singing identified by recent research. These benefits include positive emotions, social support and friendship, an antidote to anxiety and stress, and a shared sense of commitment. Evaluation of findings from the project suggest that the choir did foster students’ learning together with wellbeing.